


in secret, between the shadow and the soul

by rainbowagnes



Series: and here is the tabernacle. reconstructed [1]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Inej Centric, Inspired by Neruda's Sonnet XVll, Marriage of Convenience, introspective, its about the emotional intimacy.gif
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-06 16:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20509697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: “It’s a contract,” he said. “You should know all the details before you sign your life away.”“For heaven’s sake. I’m not signing my life away.”“When you get married, it might be difficult to annul if you’ve still got a legal Kerch-”“When I get married?” she shot back challengingly. “To who?”“I don’t know. That fire-tongued revolutionary who writes you poetry and will make you a new world. The Kaelish tavern maid who always pours you a free beer in her bar while you sing about the plight of the repressed. Someone hopelessly moon-eyed and optimistic, who thinks the world shits rainbows and who knows what you’re worth.”“You, Kaz Brekker,” she finally sighed, “are a hell of a lot dumber than they say you are.”





	in secret, between the shadow and the soul

**Author's Note:**

> I have several monster AU's I'm trying to wrangle these two into (Hunger Games AU at 16k, fucking Yikes) but I realized I hadn't written anything canonverse for them, which is a real shame as They are probably my most favorite YA ship ever and I've been pterodactyl screeching every time they interact on page since I was 14.  
This was supposed to be a one shot, but it ended up with a nice sort of half-way point in the middle and after a summer of writing I kinda wanted to Publish something, ya feel?
> 
> The main reason I don't really go into detail about Inej's ship and her crew is because I desperately want to write some fun swashbuckling stuff fully centered on them. 
> 
> The title of the fic and the Mood Itself is pretty much taken

The apothecary asks her how long it’s been since she’s been intimate with her husband, and Inej almost chokes, says no, she hasn’t been in a very long time. Honesty is always difficult in her carse- dealing with her own past, own demons is hard enough without having to watch other people attempt proper emotional responses on her behalf, and maybe the apothecary senses that because she doesn’t ask more. 

\----  


“It’s legal more than anything. A question of economics,” Kaz said, and Inej nodded, because it's Kerch and how could it be anything but? Certainly nothing as tawdry as emotion or desire, let alone love, could interfere with so large a life decision.  


Only Kerch citizens can hold berths in the water, and it's significantly easier to manage bank accounts and conduct major financial decisions of the kind Inej needs to make on the near daily when restocking her ships. There's one route faster than all the others to becoming a Kerch citizen.  


Inej suggested it before Kaz did.  


She isn’t ready for marriage, she said. She isn’t ready to be tied to a man, to be anything more or less than herself alone. The Kerch made the whole business easy by never referring to this thing they’re doing as a marriage, all the paperwork is about Economic Units, Civil Unions. There were so many pages of jargon it made Inej’s eyes bleed. Future children held less inches of fine grey type than agreements on pigs and shipping company stocks, and were described in the same economic language.  


Kaz went through the whole thing line by line until the she was sure she was going to call for an annulment before they’d even gotten the damned thing notarised, or else make herself a tastefully rich and very young widow.  


“It’s a contract,” he said. “You should know all the details before you sign your life away.”  


“For heaven’s sake,” Inej said, irritated by the last several pages about Property Division in the Event of Medium Sized or Larger Storms, Grisha Attacks, and General Flooding, “I’m not signing my life away.”  


“When you get married, it might be difficult to annul if you’ve still got a legal Kerch-”  


“When I get married?” she shot back challengingly. “To who?”  


“I don’t know. That fire-tongued revolutionary who writes you poetry and will make you a new world. The Kaelish tavern maid who always pours you a free beer in her bar while you sing about the plight of the repressed. Someone hopelessly moon-eyed and optimistic, who thinks the world shits rainbows and knows what you’re worth.”  


“You, Kaz Brekker,” she finally sighed, “are a hell of a lot dumber than they say you are.”  


\---  


She doesn’t tell her parents. She’s not ready for that conversation.  


\---  


She doesn’t tell Nina. She’s not ready for that conversation either.  


\---  


The whole thing was finished in a notary’s office in ten minutes.  


Kaz’s gloves were off, more because they both need to be fingerprinted than anything else.  


He swore a short, official oath of his loyalty to both her and the Kerch market, promising not to cheat in foreign ports and to provide for her and any hypothetical children in a sufficient manner. She thought of the paid-off indenture and the ship and the found parents and berth twenty-two and and her room in the house he bought on the Zelverstraat and thought that maybe he’s better at doing that than he thinks he is.  


She swore a shorter official oath about fidelity and staying true and all her children being her husband’s, because to do otherwise would be bad economics and make her a poor investment, a value-destroyer, on the family line. Because it’s Kerch and of course it is.  


\---  


“What are you thinking about?” he asked her afterward in an attempt at being casual. They’d been sipping at warm lukewarm flagons of beer in one of the harbour’s more reputable establishments and looking out at the water for twenty minutes.  


“I’m thinking,” she said slowly, tasting her words, “that Alys Van Eyck is a very, very lucky woman that we came around when we did.” She’s still thinking about the various punishments for women who pollute the family line, which even if motivated by economics over faith as such things would be in Fjerda, are not dissimilar in practice. She’s realising more and more the Kerch neuroticism over bastardry probably comes from having so many of the young men gone for half the year at sea.  


Kaz guffawed, which was not a sound she was really used to him making. “You never fail to surprise me, Wraith.”  


“How is the Vrouw Bajan?”  


Kaz shrugged. “Not useful to my purposes anymore. Wylan’s got her and the Herr Bajan set up in a little cottage outside Pijl with a goodly sum tied to not making too much noise.”  


Sometimes she fantasized about breaking into that cottage and putting on a performance similar to the one that sent Pekka Rollins screaming from Ketterdam. She didn’t, because she didn’t subscribe to the idea of the sins of the father and thought Saartje Bajan deserved a da with his mental pieces mostly intact. But saints take all, she wanted too.  


“How’s Saartje?”  


“I don’t know. Kid? Looks more like she could be ours than Jan Van Eyck’s, that’s for sure.  


The tips of Kaz’s ears went red before he finished that sentence and he stared into the foam at the bottom of his glass, head turned decisively away from her. 

“Fine, I think. In school now. No reason to keep tabs.”  


They toasted her new Kerch citizenship. Inej swore she saw his hand shaking.

\---- 

Her citizenship documents, stamped with a wax seal of three flying fish and a small Kerch flag came three days later, expedited by Kaz in ways she cannot begin to fathom. It was only then she realised that they’re for the new Vrouw Rietveld, that she made her vows to Kasper Rietveld. It’s only logical- Rietveld can be the upstanding businessman who only exists on paper in a way Kaz Brekker cannot, all the better for her doings, but it still feels like a piece of himself gifted to her. 

She could forge Rietveld’s name for her own purposes too; they practiced on old betting slips that she then threw into the fire. Kerch women can legally make almost every kind of financial decision and dealing, less due to the Merchers’ Council’s upstanding opinion of the female gender than the portion of the year the men are at sea, the incredible odds they won’t come back. 

(They’ve rather flipped that scenario. 

“How much cross-stitch will you do to fill up the void of my absences", she chided him. “They say the old sailor’s wives used to knit lace from the white froth of the sea.” Nowadays wealthy Kerch women waiting for their husbands to come home tended to stick to knitting hats and scarves for orphans. So saints-damned many hats and socks, and yet you could still scarcely move for the number of bare-headed, barefoot orphans come winter. It was one of Ketterdam’s greatest mysteries. 

“Inej,” Kaz said, eyes closed, genuine concern cutting his voice. Ever more she was picking up a sailor’s sense of gallows humour.) 

\--- 

They exchanged rings at the registry. Inej’s was a simple band. No gemstones, but she suspected it was solid gold. Inside was etched a wave pattern, an endless strip of open sea. 

Wearing it on her finger meant something, so she looped it onto a sturdy chain that she hid between her shirt and her beating heart. That seemed appropriate, doable. Young sailors often took the bracelets and handkerchiefs of their sweethearts out to sea as good luck tokens; Inej had a gold wedding band.

Kaz’s fingers brushed the chain in the warm dip between neck and collar as he said goodbye to her on the docks, and after she nodded infinitesimally, telling him to go on, finish this chapter of the story, he slowly pulled up the rest of the chain and found the band. 

“I thought-” he said, but she looked him in the eyes, square as she could, and he halted. She doesn’t know what he thought. 

“There was not and is not and will probably me a different man for me than you, Kaz Brekker. 

He swallowed thickly and then slowly lifted her skin-warmed band to his lips, even though he did not believe in luck, had said he believed in nothing but her. 

\--- 

The Kerch don’t have seperate words for “husband’ and “man.” 

\--- 

“Mijn mann,” she says in response to the curious looks her crew gives her after the band slips free during repair work, and it doesn’t feel like anything more or less than the truth. 

“Mijn mann,” she says tartly when border authorities raise their eyebrows in suspicion at her Kerch passport. 

“Mijn mann,” she begins her letters back to him. “Dearest Inej,” his come back, sometimes even “Loveliest Inej,” but he never uses a possessive pronoun form. 

\--- 

Having any kind of passport, official documentation, feels alien and strange. She comes from a people without a land, and for her entire childhood they Suli were denied any official documentation of Ravkan citizenship. That’s changing now, but many are still wary, and with very good reason to be. 

\--- 

The quick bureaucratic sketch to mark Vrouw Inej Rietveld as a Seetsen Van Det Kerchrepublik, looked absolutely nothing like the drawings on the three individual sets of national wanted posters that keep cropping up in seedy port cities. Absolutely none of the above get her nose right. 

“I look white in this one,” she said, holding a particularly egregious example up to Aigerim, who commiserate mightily. “Look how fucking straight this nose is. No eyebrows.” 

Hitting the nose furnishes very fun target practice for when her fingers itch to throw knives. 

Inej wins a lot of games of darts in a lot of seamy seaside pubs tucked into a lot of different gritty port cities. 

\--- 

They dock in Pijl before Ketterdam to catch their breath and do repairs. Ketterdam’s a good place for business and to look for secrets and plan strategy but a shite location to re-sew a sail or patch up a wall, unless you like replacing your supplies every time they’re stolen. The prices of grain and barrels of water and apples are lower are lower closer to the fields as well, even if that involves bartering loudly in a Centraalmarket that smells like spilled cider and pig shit, straw crunching underfoot, rather than the hallowed halls of the Exchange. 

It takes her three days to come down with the evil hybrid chest cold-stomache flu of her fucking life. Ameera shoves her back into bed with ginger tea and another blanket. The thing they don’t tell you about awesome pirate ships with awesome international crews is that you also get the full spectrum of awesome international germs. 

By the fourth day, she’s putting on all three of her coats and stuffing a wad of kruge and her passport into a pocket to visit the clinic in town. 

\--- 

Other people seem to register this whole being-married business than Inej ever does. She just prefers the expedited customs lines. 

The splotchy faced, matronly woman at the clinic sits her on a paper-covered table and reads through a list of questions on a clipboard. Nian loves the lab smell of pure alcohol, would probably dab it on as perfume if she could, but Inej only associates it with injury, with being patched and stitched up after a bad scrape, with the white-coated doctor who came in every two weeks to swab Tante Heleen’s girls for disease, with the brown bottle of the stuff she uses to clean blood and worse off of her knives. 

“Family history of pulmonary infections?” the woman asks her. “Smoking, alcohol, jurda use?” Every question makes her squirm slightly, as if in the historyof her wheezing lunghs is some sin she’s committed and will only now find out about. Nejn, nejn, nejn. Inej forgot how much she hated being looked at. 

No grisha in her family that she knows of- scribble scribble scribble- but a lot of bad eyesight. 

“When was the last time you had intimate relations with your husband?” the woman asks bluntly, and that’s the question that knocks the air out from her. The woman’s thin yellow eyebrow quirks up, but Inej manages to disguise her gasp as a particularly bad fit of hacking. She knows its nothing but a bit of intrusive medical questioning, but words can have many meanings and the answers to questions can be both yes and no at the same time and a certain turn of phrase can punch like a fist and cut like a knife. So she just says “six months ago,” and gives the woman her answer for the write-up. 

“Long time.” 

“He’s a sailor. I cry as I wait for him to return to me.” 

“Ghezen’s speed that he does.” 

\--- 

She isn’t quite sure the Kerch even believe in Ghezen as anything beyond a bit of window-dressing to their financial affairs and the punchlien to jokes. Not like she honours her saints, the small painted icon of Sankta Inej she also keeps next to her heart, her daily prayers in the dark comfort her her room. She stands with Merjan, one of her crewmates, at the grave of Sankta Mahari, Queen of Mercy and Patroness of the Lost as they read the ancient prayers together, their voices settling into the steadiness of bees. Our queen, protector of our people, give us mercy, pray for peace, pray for us, pray to bring light to the shadows of the things we have done. 

Sankta Anastasia, Sankt Dmitri, Sankta Mahari, she whispers into her knuckles, her fingers moving along the prayer rope with the decisive snapping of wooden beats, pray for our safety in the storm and bring us to the shore. 

\--- 

If Inej has found her own name, written with a familar jagged hand, among the prayer-knots tied to the Zentzbridge in a plea of mercy from the sea, she will not mention it. 

\--- 

Ketterdam is ugly and bright and familiear. You can smell the rotting flesh and beer smell before you see the smoky smudge of the city on the horizon. The crew makes quick work of unfolding the grishaworked official three-flying-fish flag that gives them clearance to enter the harbour without having their decks searched by the council of tides and carefully docks at Berth 22. Considering that the berths are now being numbered out into the two-hundereds, its a plum location, but its also damn close to the action, meaning that she can already see the glimmer of plastic beads floating on the water, the dark smudges of drunkards bobbing along. A few of the crew memebrs are going to get their pockets picked right off the bat. Inej already has a slush fund tucked away for precisily this reason. She’s getting better at this, she hopes, being a leader. Predicting what will happena dn why and when. Being someone that other people- many younger and more vulnerable than her- can rely on. 

“AIGERIM,” she screams as she buttons up her city coat, “only two of thsoe pink trinks with the paper umbrellas MAXIMUM. You hear me?” 

“Yeah, boss.” 

She sighs. She doesn’t want to be anyone’s boss. “If there’s anything like what happened with the canal and the Stadwatch last time happens again, I think I’ll find the decks need a good scrubbing.” 

Aigerim gestures wildly. “Course, boss..” 

She tries to take deep rbeaths to calm her nerves. Maybe she’s becoming a worried old crone forty years early, but she’s the one who survived this hellhole of a city. She’s the one who survived this far. In this world, twenty-three is a badge of honour. 

\--- 

He cuts a familar figure on the docks. THey each have their own webts now, know of each other’s doings three or four times removed, {like recognising a faovrite drinking song on it’s third round of translation.} The recognition of a familiar trick, hand, murder method. Kaz will read in a newspaper of a mysterious storm that’s tripled the price of indigo and sweet-wood fans after a whole line of ships went missing off the Southern Pelagic Reefs and Inej will hear in a greasy Kaelish bar about the shocking downfall of an old Kerch trading family and they will each smile, privately, and admire the other’s handiwork. 

But seeing him in person is something altogether different, and she still rushes over the slats of the quay, coat streaming behind her, stopping abruptly when she comes to him. They pause there for a second and then he lifts his arms and they wrap themselves together around each other, hesitantly but then warmly, firmly, sturdy as a sailor’s knot and with all the inevitability of the sea wearing stone to sand. 

“I’ve missed you, Wraith,” he says into her hair and she shrugs into him, her head level with his chest. His chin rests neatly on her head now, if he leans down slighlty, and she swears that wasnt the case the first time they embraced, the first time she left Ketterdam. He denies that the Ice Court, Van Eyck, all that happened while he was a boy not finished with growing. Yet she herself’s tried on that first Wraith outfit- a costume of sorts, really, how different was it from the Scarab Queen’s glass-bead veil in the third act of the Komedie Brute- to find it no longer fit, that she couldn’t easily do up the buttons on the front. She has more of a woman’s set of curves to her hips and long, hard-earned muscles on her legs and thighs, and even if she is creating some new kind of legend it is under her own name now. 

Sometimes, Ketterdam feels like that too-small jacket; it cannot fit the woman she’s becoming. So she sews herself a new coat from the fabric of the world. 

“Mijn mann,” she says, because she likes the way his body flinches and then stills under her fingers with those words, sharp and unexpected as any knife. “I’ve missed you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. Thoughts, comments, opinions? 
> 
> Hit me up @tovezza on tumblr!


End file.
